Mathematics for the interested outsider

Okay, hopefully now that I’m back in Kentucky and I’ve gotten the first day of all three of my classes under my belt, I can get back into the groove.

In a little while we’re going to want to talk about “evaluating” a power series like we did when we considered polynomials as functions. But when we try to map into our base field, we get a sequence of values and we ask questions about convergence. That means we need to have a topology on our field! Luckily there are a few hanging around.

The real numbers have a topology. In fact, that’s really their main characteristic. The rational numbers have a topology too, but the whole motivation of the construction of the real numbers is that rational numbers have a lot of holes that sequence limits fall through. Since we’re talking about sequences here we really need the tighter weave that the real numbers provide.

What else can we use? The complex numbers form a two-dimensional vector space over the reals, which means that as a vector space we have the isomorphism . So let’s just use the product metric, along with the topology it gives on the complex numbers.

Let’s be a little explicit here: the product metric depends on picking the basis for as a vector space over . We get the “size” of a complex number , and then we define the distance between two complex numbers as the size of their difference.

I said before that there may be many different distance functions that give the same topology, so why do we really want to use this one? Well, it turns out that this formula can actually be written in a really neat way in complex number language. If we have a complex number we also have its conjugate . Then we can calculate the product

This is just the square of our distance function, written as a complex number! But also notice that this formula is symmetric between a complex number and its conjugate. That is, conjugation preserves the size of complex numbers, as we should expect because there’s no a priori difference between the two.

Now we need to prove that the field operations are continuous. For multiplication, for example, we need to ask that if is close to and is close to , then is close to . We write and , and multiply out

The condition is that for any real we can find real and so that and together imply that . From here it’s a bunch of mucking around with our formula, but none of it is very difficult.

At the end of the day, we’ve got two topological fields to work with — the real numbers and the complex numbers — and we can talk about evaluating power series from or .

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that it’s also easy to see that the norm is multiplicative. That is, .

Prodded by some comments, I think I’ll go even further afield from linear algebra. It’s a slightly different order than I’d originally thought of, but it will lead to some more explicit examples when we’re back in the realm of linear algebra, so it’s got its own benefits.

I’ll note here in passing that mathematics actually doesn’t proceed in a straight line, despite the impression most people get. The lower-level classes are pretty standard, yes — natural-number arithmetic, fractions, algebra, geometry, calculus, and so on. But at about this point where most people peter out, the subject behaves more like an alluvial fan — many parallel rivulets carry off in different directions, but they’re all ultimately part of the same river. So in that metaphor, I’m pulling a bit of an avulsion.

Anyhow, power series are sort of like polynomials, except that the coefficients don’t have to die out at infinity. That is, when we consider the algebra of polynomials as a vector space over it’s isomorphic to the infinite direct sum

but the algebra of power series — written — is isomorphic to the infinite direct product

It’s important to note here that the do not form a basis here, since we can’t write an arbitrary power series as a finite linear combination of them. But really they should behave like a basis, because they capture the behavior of every power series. In particular, if we specify that then we have a well-defined multiplication extending that of power series.

I don’t want to do all the fine details right now, but I can at least sketch how this all works out, and how we can adjust our semantics to talk about power series as if the were an honest basis. The core idea is that we’re going to introduce a topology on the space of polynomials.

So what polynomials should be considered “close” to each other? It turns out to make sense to consider those which agree in their lower-degree terms to be close. That is, we should have the space of tails

as an open set. More concretely, for every polynomial with degree there is an open set consisting of those polynomials so that divides the difference .

Notice here that any power series defines, by cutting it off after successively higher degree terms, a descending sequence of these open sets. More to the point, it defines a sequence of polynomials. If the power series’ coefficients are zero after some point — if it’s a polynomial itself — then this sequence stops and stays at that polynomial. But if not it never quite settles down to any one point in the space. Doesn’t this look familiar?

Exactly. Earlier we had sequences of rational numbers which didn’t converge to a rational number. Then we completed the topology to give us the real numbers. Well here we’re just doing the same thing! It turns out that the topology above gives a uniform structure to the space of polynomials, and we can complete that uniform structure to give the vector space underlying the algebra of power series.

So here’s the punch line: once we do this, it becomes natural to consider not just linear maps, but continuous linear maps. Now the images of the can’t be used to uniquely specify a linear map, but they will specify at most one value for a continuous linear map! That is, any power series comes with a sequence converging to it — its polynomial truncations — and if we know the values then we have uniquely defined images of each of these polynomial truncations since each one is a finite linear combination. Then continuity tells us that the image of the power series must be the limit of this sequence of images, if the limit exists.

Okay, we know that we can factor any complex polynomial into linear factors because the complex numbers are algebraically closed. But we also know that real polynomials can have too few roots. Now, there are a lot of fields out there that aren’t algebraically closed, and I’m not about to go through all of them. But we use the real numbers so much because of the unique position it holds by virtue of the interplay between its topology and its algebra. So it’s useful to see what we can say about real polynomials.

We start by noting that since the real numbers sit inside the complex numbers, we can consider any real polynomial as a complex polynomial. If the polynomial has a real root , then the complex polynomial has a root . So all the real roots still show up.

Now, we might not have as many real roots as the degree would indicate. But we are sure to have as many complex roots as the degree, which will include the real roots. Some of the roots may actually be complex numbers like . Luckily, one really interesting thing happens here: if is a root, then so is its complex conjugate .

Let’s write out our polynomial , where all the are real numbers. To say that is a root means that when we substitute it for we get the equation

Now we can take the complex conjugate of this equation

But complex conjugation is a field automorphism, so it preserves both addition and multiplication

Now since all the (and ) are real, complex conjugation leaves them alone. Conjugation sends to , and so we find

So is a root as well. Thus if we have a (complex) linear factor like we’ll also have another one like . These multiply to give

which is a real polynomial again.

Now let’s start with our polynomial of degree . We know that over the complex numbers it has a root . If this root is real, then we can write

where is another real polynomial which has degree . On the other hand, if is complex then is also a root of , and so we can write

where is another real polynomial which has degree .

Either way, now we can repeat our reasoning starting with . At each step we can pull off either a linear term or a quadratic term (which can’t be factor into two real linear terms).

Thus every real polynomial factors into the product of a bunch of linear polynomials and a bunch of irreducible quadratic polynomials, and the number of linear factors plus twice the number of quadratic factors must add up to the degree of . It’s not quite so nice as the situation over the complex numbers, but it’s still pretty simple. We’ll see many situations into the future where this split between two distinct real roots and a conjugate pair of complex roots (and the border case of two equal real roots) shows up with striking qualitative effects.

Yesterday we defined a field to be algebraically closed if any polynomial over the field always has exactly as many roots (counting multiplicities) as we expect from its degree. But we don’t know a single example of an algebraically complete field. Today we’ll (partially) remedy that problem.

First, remember the example we used for a polynomial with no roots over the real numbers. That is . The problem is that we have no field element whose square is . So let’s just postulate one! This, of course, has the same advantages as those of theft over honest toil. We write our new element as for “imaginary”, and throw it in with the rest of the real numbers .

Okay, just like when we threw in as a new element, we can build up sums and products involving real numbers and this new element . But there’s one big difference here: we have a relation that must satisfy. When we use the evaluation map we must find . And, of course, any polynomial which includes as a factor must evaluate to as well. But this is telling us that the kernel of the evaluation homomorphism for contains the principal ideal.

Can it contain anything else? If is a polynomial in the kernel, but is not divisible by , then Euclid’s algorithm gives us a greatest common divisor of and , which is a linear combination of these two, and must have degree either or . In the former case, we would find that the evaluation map would have to send everything — even the constant polynomials — to zero. In the latter case, we’d have a linear factor of , which would be a root. Clearly neither of these situations can occur, so the kernel of the evaluation homomorphism at is exactly the principal ideal .

Now the first isomorphism theorem for rings tells us that we can impose our relation by taking the quotient ring . But what we just discussed above further goes to show that is a maximal ideal, and the quotient of a ring by a maximal ideal is a field! Thus when we take the real numbers and adjoin a square root of to get a ring we might call , the result is a field. This is the field of “complex numbers”, which is more usually written .

Now we’ve gone through a lot of work to just add one little extra element to our field, but it turns out this is all we need. Luckily enough, the complex numbers are already algebraically complete! This is very much not the case if we were to try to algebraically complete other fields (like the rational numbers). Unfortunately, the proof really is essentially analytic. It seems to be a completely algebraic statement, but remember all the messy analysis and topology that went into defining the real numbers.

Don’t worry, though. We’ll come back and prove this fact once we’ve got a bit more analysis under our belts. We’ll also talk a lot more about how to think about complex numbers. But for now all we need to know is that they’re the “algebraic closure” of the real numbers, we get them by adding a square root of that we call , and we can use them as an example of an algebraically closed field.

One thing we can point out now, though, is the inherent duality of our situation. You see, we didn’t just add one square root of . Indeed, once we have complex numbers to work with we can factor as (test this by multiplying it out and imposing the relation). Then we have another root: . This is just as much a square root of as was, and anything we can do with we can do with . That is, there’s a symmetry in play that exchanges and . We can pick one and work with it, but we must keep in mind that whenever we do we’re making a non-canonical choice.

First off, let’s work over the real numbers and consider the polynomial . A root of will be a real number so that , but a little playing around will show us that is the only possible solution. The degree of the polynomial is two, so we expect two roots, but we only find one. What went wrong?

Well, we know from the fact that is a root that is a factor of . Our division algorithm shows us that we can write . The factor that gives us the root shows up twice! But since we’ve already counted the root once the second occurrence doesn’t do anything.

To remedy this, let’s define the “multiplicity” of a root to be the number of times we can evenly divide out a factor of . So in our example the root has multiplicity . When we count the roots along with their multiplicities, we get back exactly the degree.

So do multiplicities handle all our problems? Unfortunately, no. An example here over the real numbers is the polynomial . A root of this polynomial would be a real number with . But since the square of any real number is nonnegative, this can’t be satisfied. So there exist polynomials with fewer roots than their degrees would indicate; even with no roots at all!

Now, some fields are well-behaved. We say that a field is “algebraically closed” if every polynomial over that field has a root . In that case we can divide out by to get a polynomial of one degree less, which must again have a root by algebraic closure. We can keep going until we write the polynomial as the product of a bunch of linear factors — the number is the same as the degree of the polynomial — and leave one field element left once we get down to degree zero. Thus over an algebraically closed field every polynomial has exactly as many roots as its degree indicates.. if you count them with their multiplicities!

Consider the division algorithm. It looks a lot like division for integers, as it should. Specifically, it’s got all the features we need for the setup of Euclid’s Algorithm, and we have an analogue here!

Just like we did back then, we start with two polynomials and , and we divide them to find . Then if we turn around and divide to find . We keep going until we end up with a remainder of , at which point we can’t divide anymore, and so we stop. And we must eventually stop, because the degree of the remainders keep going down.

At the end, the last nonzero remainder will be the “greatest common divisor” of and . That is, it’s a polynomial that divides both and (leaving no remainder), and any other such common divisor must itself evenly divide .

Euclid’s algorithm also gives us a way of writing out the greatest common divisor as a linear combination . Just like for the integers, this marks the greatest common divisor as the linear combination with the least degree.

Now how to show all this? It’s easy: just go back to the proof of Euclid’s algorithm for integers! Everything works the same way again. We just have to stick in references to the degree where appropriate to measure the “size” of a polynomial.

In fact, if we can equip any integral domain with a degree function (where is the set of nonzero ring elements) so that we have a division algorithm like those for integers and polynomials, then we’ve got the setup for Euclid’s algorithm. In this case, we say we have a “Euclidean domain”. So the point here is that is Euclidean, and so it has a form of Euclid’s algorithm, and all that follows from it.

Notice that in the case of the integers we had some ambiguity about common divisors, since would both work equally well. The point here is that they differ by multiplication by a unit, and so each divides the other. This sort of thing happens in the divisibility preorder for any ring. For polynomials, the units are just the nonzero elements of the base field, considered as constant (degree zero) polynomials. Thus the greatest common divisor is only determined up to a constant multiple, but we can easily ignore that little ambiguity. The “greatest” just has to be read as referring to the degree of the polynomial.

Polynomials generally form a ring, and not a field. However, the integers also form a ring, and we have a notion of division from arithmetic. For polynomials we have a similar form of division we’ll discuss now. Instead of using the absolute value of an integer to measure its size, we’ll use the degree of a polynomial to measure its size.

Given two polynomials and , we can find two more polynomials — the quotient and the remainder — so that , and . These polynomials are unique. The fact that we can find them is called the “division algorithm”, even though it’s a theorem. There are various algorithms we can use to establish this fact, but one of the most straightforward is polynomial long division, which we were all taught in high school algebra.

We start by writing . If the degree of is less than that of , we’re done. Otherwise let’s write and . The polynomials lead off with terms and . If we multiply by its leading term becomes exactly the same as that of , so when we subtract the top degree terms cancel out. That is, we write , and we see that has degree less than that of .

Now if the degree of is still greater than or equal to that of we can keep going. Multiply by a term so that when we subtract the product from we’ll kill off the highest remaining term and drop its degree. Since the degree of the remainder keeps going down, it must eventually drop below that of . Even if the degree of is zero, we can get the remainder down to the polynomial , which we decided to give the degree . This gives us our and

Now for uniqueness. Let’s say we have and , and both and have degrees less than that of . We can subtract to find . Now the degree on the right must be less than that of , since adding and subtracting polynomials can’t increase the degree beyond the larger of the two. On the left, on the other hand, the degree is at least that of , with one exception: if . In this case the left hand side vanishes. Since this is the only way to drop the degree of the left-hand side we must have . And then on the right we find .

This one might have to suffice for two days. The movers are almost done loading the truck here in New Orleans, and I’ll be taking today and tomorrow to drive to Maryland.

We can actually tease out more information from the factorization we constructed yesterday. Bur first we need a little definition.

Remember that when we set up the algebra of polynomials we noted that the coefficients have to be all zero after some finite number of them. Thus there must be a greatest nonzero coefficient . The index corresponding to this coefficient we call the “degree” of the polynomial. If all the coefficients are zero — giving the zero polynomial — then a common convention is to assign it degree . This actually isn’t completely arbitrary, but the details won’t concern us until later.

So, armed with this information, look at how we constructed the factorization . We replaced each term in with the term . Then we factored out from this term, giving . So the highest power of that shows up in this term (with a nonzero coefficient) is . And the highest power coming from all the terms of will be . The power shows up only once in the expression for , so there’s no way for two such terms to add together and make its coefficient turn out to be zero, and no higher power of ever shows up at all. Thus the degree of is one less than that of .

So what does this gain us? Well, each time we find a root we can factor out a term like , which reduces the degree by . So if has degree there can only be at most roots!

A nonzero constant polynomial has degree , but it also has no roots! Perfect.

A linear polynomial has degree , and it has exactly one root: .

Now let’s assume that our statement is true for all polynomials of degree : they have or fewer roots. Then given a polynomial of degree either has a root or it doesn’t. If it doesn’t, then we’re already done. If it does, then we can factor , where has degree . But then can have at most roots, and thus can have at most roots!

A nice little corollary of this is that if our base field is infinite (like it is for the most familiar examples) then only the zero polynomial can give us the zero function when we evaluate it at various field elements. That is, if for all , then . This must be true because has an infinite number of roots, and so no finite degree polynomial can possibly have that many roots. The only possibility left is the zero polynomial.

Just to be clear, though, let’s look at this one counterexample. Think about the field we used when we talked about Set. The polynomial is not the zero polynomial, but is the zero function. Indeed , , and , which is divisible by , and so is the same as in this field.

When I set up the algebra of polynomials I was careful to specify that the element is not a “variable”, as in high school algebra. Why do I have to do that? What is the “variable” thing that we were all taught, then?

We’ve got the algebra of polynomials over the base field . Now I’m going to define a function called the “evaluation map”. We define by first writing out in terms of the standard basis

Remember here that the sum must terminate after a finite number of basis elements. Then we just stick the field element in for to get an expression written out in the field itself:

Now the superscripts on each must be read as exponents. This defines a particular element of the field. If we keep the polynomial fixed and let range over we get a function from to itself, which we can abuse notation to write as . This is the notion of polynomial-as-function we were taught in high school.

But it’s actually more interesting to see what happens as we fix and let vary over all polynomials. The map turns out to be a homomorphism of -algebras! Indeed, given polynomials

(the top coefficients here may be zero, and all higher coefficients definitely are) and a field element we find

I’ll let you write out the verification that it also preserves multiplication.

In practice this “evaluation homomorphism” provides a nice way of extracting information about polynomials. And considering polynomials as functions provides another valuable slice of information. But we must still keep in mind the difference between the abstract polynomial

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This is mainly an expository blath, with occasional high-level excursions, humorous observations, rants, and musings. The main-line exposition should be accessible to the “Generally Interested Lay Audience”, as long as you trace the links back towards the basics. Check the sidebar for specific topics (under “Categories”).

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